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Finding Depth in Fela’s Women

Three of the nine women who play Fela’s co-wives, from left, Aimee Graham Wodobode, Nicole Chantal de Weever and Iris Wilson.Credit
Chad Batka for The New York Times

This is the short list of how the women of “Fela!,” the Broadway musical about the Nigerian Afrobeat musician and political agitator, do not see their characters: victims, go-go dancers, sex objects.

The nine women in tight outfits, elaborate hairdos and painted faces represent the 27 real-life co-wives of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, who married them collectively in what he considered a personal and political gesture as he fought against Nigeria’s corrupt authoritarian regime and defended traditional African culture.

The women have no individual lines. In any other show they would be considered part of the chorus. Yet they maintain a constant, magnetic stage presence, dancing and singing at Fela’s nightclub, the Shrine, in the Lagos of the late ’70s. While their stories are not told, their characters have been thoroughly studied and embodied by the performers, who see them as an integral part of the complex and contradictory tale of the man who inspired the musical.

“The relationship is more intricate than just a bunch of passive women who let a man do whatever he wanted,” Aimee Graham Wodobode, a dancer who plays a wife named Sewaa, said during a recent interview with five of the wives, called queens, at a Midtown restaurant. “They believed in his mission and were ready to die for him.”

Iris Wilson, whose character, Najite, met Fela when she 14 and described him as a combination father, mother and comrade in the fight for African democracy, said, “These were women who stood for something, who spoke out with Fela against the corrupt African government.”

Abena Koomson, whose character, Funmi, a former dancer, is pregnant in the musical and hangs back with the band, said: “Fela could not have done what he did by himself. Afrobeat music really takes a community. What it requires is polyrhythm, many different sounds. In many ways that’s a metaphor for community, for the call and response of African music. The queens are that sound, that affirmation.”

Fela’s collective marriage in 1978 to the women — many of whom had been teenagers when they first came to the Shrine and then his home to escape their families or find personal fulfillment — takes only a few minutes onstage. Fela says to the assembled women, “Will you marry me?,” and they respond, “Yeah, yeah.”

What the audience might not know is that the marriage — often described in prurient terms by the news media over the years — had been publicly described by Fela as a gesture of political solidarity and emotional support for his women after a devastating 1977 raid on his compound in Lagos, called Kalakuta.

One thousand soldiers swarmed Kalakuta, beating Fela and raping and viciously abusing some of the women — an episode depicted vividly onstage. Fela’s 77-year-old mother, Funmilayo Anikulapo-Kuti, herself a political counterforce to Nigeria’s authoritarian regime, died the following year from injuries suffered after the soldiers threw her out a window.

Within the musical’s kinetic framework the queens’ flourishes are subtle. “One slaps his hand away, one is like his pet, another does not look at him,” said Bill T. Jones, the show’s director and choreographer.

The audience has to look closely. None of them like Fela’s African-American lover, Sandra Isadore (played by Saycon Sengbloh), so they maintain a physical distance from her. And even though the performers crowd the theater’s aisles, Mr. Jones instructed them not to “bat your eyes or wiggle your hips at the audience.”

Ms. Wodobode, whose character is from Ghana, said: “If you look at our faces and attitudes during the play, it’s not a ‘look at me.’ We are not grinning and gyrating and trying to please. We are there to create a community, to make a statement, to help create music.”

Photo

In the musical “Fela!,” the Nigerian title character, played here by Sahr Ngaujah, is surrounded by his co-wives, known as “queens.”Credit
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Ms. Wilson said one of Fela’s friends helped develop her character. “He said my role in the play is to always be attending to Fela because that is what she did, so you see me lighting his cigarettes, giving him his saxophone, wiping his brow.”

Afi McClendon, who plays Ihase, the youngest-looking, smallest queen, said she saw the women as rebels. “In this day and age, feminine energy is so understated,” Ms. McClendon said as she got into her makeup for a show. “They were women who had the courage to define themselves as individuals in a society that was so corrupt and did not allow them to be the individuals that they were."

Lauren De Veaux, who plays Alake, discovered that her character was 17 when she met a 35-year-old Fela and went to school with his eldest daughter. “Some of them were D.J.’s at the Shrine,” she said, dismissing the notion that the women were political accessories. “They did choreography.”

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Nicole de Weever described her role, Adeola, as an intellectual young woman from Ghana with artistic aspirations, from a polygamous middle-class family.

Although the women had some dialogue in an early workshop incarnation of “Fela!,” Mr. Jones decided to streamline the show with 9 wives instead of 27 and to present them through Fela’s eyes.

“It was unwieldy,” Mr. Jones recalled of attempts to use dialogue. “The people we were working with were primarily dancers, not actors, and I didn’t want to fall into the trap of this being a fascination with polygamous lifestyle.”

Like the real-life queens, the performers come from various places. Ms. de Weever is from the Dutch Caribbean island of St. Maarten, and Ms. De Veaux is from Chattanooga, Tenn. Ms. Koomson’s parents are from Ghana, but she grew up in New England. Ms. Wodobode was born in the Central Africa Republic and grew up in Paris. Ms. Wilson was raised in Queens; Ms. McClendon was born and reared in the Bronx.

With the exception of Ms. Koomson, the women — most of whom are making their Broadway debuts here and had appeared in Off Broadway incarnations of the show — knew one another through other performances.

Much of their information about Fela and his queens came from the “Fela: This Bitch of a Life,” a biography by Carlos Moore, an ethnologist and political scientist who knew Fela. (The book was published in Europe in 1982, and in the United States this year by Lawrence Hill Books.)

Mr. Moore met with Mr. Jones and the performers. “I did not want them to appear as they were often portrayed in the media, practically as prostitutes,” Mr. Moore said, speaking by phone from his home in Salvador, Brazil. “It is extremely unfair to these women who suffered so much for their political beliefs. He really loved these women. I saw that.”

At the same time, the interviews in his biography show Fela as a man who slapped his wives to maintain authority and used profanity to talk about the centrality of sex to his relationships with women. He was both sexist and savior, pushing the women to educate themselves and using them as political agitprop at times. In the biography the wives talked about their love for Fela and their wish to have his children, and also about their shared battle against corruption and repression anywhere in the world.

During 30 years of protests Fela was imprisoned at least a dozen times. After one such stretch, about eight years into the collective marriage, he pronounced the institution of marriage a fraud, and some of his wives left him, according Mr. Moore’s biography. Other relationships frayed over the years as Fela endured prison and later suffered from AIDS. He was 58 when he died in 1997.

As far as Mr. Moore knows, the co-wives bore four or five of the children fathered by Fela, and perhaps three of the women died of AIDS. (In 1961 he legally married Remi Taylor.) Today the former wives are scattered around the world, with at least one in London and a handful still in Nigeria, he said.

The women of “Fela!” all said they hoped the future would bring a more thorough telling of the stories of the women behind the man. Until then, “it’s O.K. if people go home making up their own stories,” Ms. Wodobode said. “We have a lot of fantasies about the queens too.”

Correction: December 18, 2009

Because of an editing error, an article on Thursday about the actresses in the Broadway musical “Fela!” who portray wives of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti referred incorrectly to their identification on stage. The wives’ names are in fact mentioned at one point.

A version of this article appears in print on December 17, 2009, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Finding Nuance in Fela’s Women. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe